Vacations in Chaos · Tend and Flow

A 1970s open-plan office. Two men in holiday clothes walk out with suitcases past a Summer Party banner, while a robot sits alone at a desk in front of a monitor headed ‘List for robot’. Through the windows behind it a hillside is on fire, water-bombing aircraft circle, and people queue at a standpipe beneath a Hosepipe Ban In Force sign.

Background

With the start of school holidays, our local town suddenly becomes very quiet. It is wonderful. But it made me think about the future of vacations. Do organisations using AI relax their ‘human-in-the-loop’ controls during this time of year? How close are we to letting AI agents do more autonomously when the team is down to skeleton staff? There’s that irony again of AI use exacerbating the climate crisis, leading to a very troubling set of events. Still, it’s summer time.

(This is my original thinking, developed and produced with AI support from Claude Sonnet 4.6 and Google Nano Banana 2)